Thinstall executives claim to be working on a persistent caching mechanism for Thinstall and say they’ll address the SMB sharing limitation in the near future. In the meantime, the company has begun talking up its new License Manager product which will hopefully address another of the product’s shortcomings: the inability to enable, disable, and monitor access (including license compliance) to Thinstall packaged applications.

Thinstall License Manager will be released as open source, allowing IT shops to customize the PHP-based (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) server components to meet their specific requirements. Until then, potential Thinstall customers will need to weigh the advantages (raw speed plus no client agent or streaming servers required) against the disadvantages (reliance on SMB shares and the absence of an integrated caching mechanism) and hope that the company comes through on its promises to flesh out the Thinstall architecture.

Picking a winner

Neither Thinstall nor SVS Pro nor SoftGrid is fully baked. But while all of them have quirks and limitations, only one of them delivers an experience that’s within striking distance of our stated target of a true click ‘n' run solution: Symantec SVS Pro 2.1. Despite the awkward integration of the native virtualization component and the OEM delivery mechanism, Symantec’s choice of AppStream as its streaming partner yields additional dividends, such as the ability to stream both virtualized and non-virtualized applications from the same platform. SVS Pro is the most complete of the three platforms, and an initial one time delay of a minute or so -- which will disappear after the application is cached -- is a minor nit against an otherwise impressive solution.

SoftGrid, by contrast, is a product in transition. The old bits are getting stale, but that’s to be expected for a code base that is in the process of being strip mined. Expect to see pieces of SoftGrid technology popping up all over Microsoft’s product line with the end game of delivering an on-demand platform from which the company can distribute most of its wares. In the meantime, the product that was Softricity’s crown jewel is now available as a freebie for Microsoft’s most loyal customers. These shops will want to take advantage of the opportunity to kick SoftGrid’s tires and to prepare for what will doubtless be a major push by Microsoft to seed its version of application virtualization throughout the enterprise computing landscape.

The odd man out in the trio is Thinstall. Thinstall's integrated Virtual Operating System is still a technical marvel. Where else can you find so much muscle crammed into a 300K file header? However, the company’s lack of progress in building out the management and delivery mechanisms has left Thinstall looking more and more like a one-trick pony. Those lingering deployment issues -- no caching, SMB-only streaming -- need to be addressed immediately, while the more visionary elements of the Thinstall executive team must start painting a bigger picture before enterprise customers lose interest. Perhaps the best case would be if Thinstall were acquired by a larger player (IBM and HP come to mind) who can help them weave their innovative virtualization tool into a cohesive delivery and management framework to counter those of Microsoft and Symantec.